Author: Sarah A. Hoyt

“We are each of an unsocial, taciturn disposition, unwilling to speak, unless we expect to say something that will amaze the whole room, and be handed down to posterity with all the eclat of a proverb.”
― Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

Yesterday, in responding to my post, RES  Mark Alger (Update — yes, I got who said it wrong.  But in retrospect, it was all RES’s fault for saying Pfui in such a Nero Wolfe like manner.  Coff.  Oh, okay, fine, my mind has been coming back — slowly and by degrees — from wherever it went while I was ill.  But slowly is the operational point.  So my excuse is that I was ill.  Besides, I was led astray by evil companions, and further more I was never there.  And I have a whitlow!  Pfui.) made the point that there is such a thing as story comfort-food.  He brought up Rex Stout, whose stories I tend to devour again and again, particularly when I’m feeling down, and which are, in fact, set pieces.

He could have brought up other examples, too.  Like, say, romances.  I have recently started going on binges of regency romances when I’m not feeling quite the thing.  (No, not contemporary romances, because half of those break the story for the obligatory feminist rant, and then the book goes against the wall, and it’s just bad for my disposition in general.)  Romances, in general, in fact, have weathered the trouble in the book business better than most.  There are other books that fall in this category: Cozy mysteries, for instance (for those who are not versed with the terms, these are similar to the works of Agatha Christie) and classical space opera, or even quest fantasy.

If the main couple didn’t end up getting together at the end of a romance, if the detective didn’t solve the mystery, if the brave and plucky young man/woman didn’t win out at the end of the space opera, and if the quest fantasy didn’t fall out in the expected way, the reader would be very disappointed indeed.

Note that all these genres and subgenres are hated by most publishing houses, who have spent the last thirty years either trying to subvert them and giving them “astonishing” endings, (which lose readers) or suppress them by proclaiming ex-cathedra things like “cozy mysteries aren’t real mysteries” or “space opera isn’t really science fiction.  Science fiction needs a big idea.”  Romance in turn inspires them with a sort of incoherent rage, unless it’s the sort of “mainstreamish” literary “romance” in which everyone lives lives of astonishing irrelevance and is not allowed an happy-for-a-moment, much less a Happy-Ever-After.

I understand their point of view.  Truly I do.  I understand it beyond the easiest explanation which is “most traditional house editors are poopy-heads.”  Most of them are NOT poopy-heads, and most of them are, in fact, trying to do the best they can.

However, I’ll also note, that though I can’t prove this, the feeling I have from countless writer-editor dinners and countless talks at cons, is that with one notable exception (yes, you know who.)  most of them aren’t readers, either.  Not in their spare time.  They might have started out as readers, but – defeated by the pile of stuff that must be read for work – now relax in front of the TV or the game console. This has caused them to forget what the feel of being a reader is, and what it is like to read for entertainment.  Hence curious ideas like “the reader doesn’t want more than one book by the same author in one year” and also, of course the “astonish me” mode.

The main driver of the “astonish me” mode, though, is that they read so much for work.  IOW they read so much with an editorial eye out, and when they don’t really feel like reading for fun.  And they get bored.  They get astonishingly bored.

I remember this from when I read slush for friends, or even when I’ve edited invite-anthos.  You have to be very careful not to read more than say three stories in a row, because after that, your readers-mind is numbed, and the editor comes out.  And the editor gets bored.  And the editor wants surprise.  He (or in my case, she) wants something to break the mind-numbing boredom; something different, startling.

Of course, this is not ALL that is wrong – there is also the fact that most editors, at least since the sixties or so, have been liberal arts graduates.  As a literature major (forgive me, it was another country, there were fewer options, and besides, the wench is dead) I know what that is like.  You analyze literature, you think of it from angles that would never occur to a normal human being (“in this paragraph, Goethe refers to his feet carrying him into the forest.  This denotes an almost psychotic loss of control” – or, the jaded writer says, maybe he just didn’t want to start another sentence with “he walked.”) This creates a feeling of “separation” from the common writer, a disdain for people who read merely for pleasure.  Oikophobia sets in, which leads editors to regard falling numbers or complaints from the readers as proof that they’re in fact right and readers need to be “educated.”  Most of all, due to the way evaluations and pronouncements are made in most literature courses, they are afraid of putting a foot wrong and rely on the quality-judgements of their equals, i.e., other literature graduates, because hey, would you trust the mere readers?

All of this has combined over the last thirty years or so to push the surprise ending and the surprise denouement into most genres.  Unfortunately, this is not what the average reader wants.  A surprise ending is fine – if the trail has been laid very well indeed, though, I’ll point out, this is more difficult to do than it seems – now and then, for a break of ennui.  But someone like me who mostly reads for entertainment and to decompress, or simply to keep the voices in her head quiet while she does dishes or cooks (there are times I don’t need another story idea, thank you sooo much.) doesn’t often need surprise.  And unless you have the genius, of say, Jill McGown, who can spin a mystery on its head three times in the last four pages, all using the same facts, most surprise endings are, in fact, disappointing.

I remember the first time in the seventies when I hit an ending to a colonization story and EVERYONE died.  Two more of those and I stopped reading that subgenre of SF.  There was no conscious decision.  I just stopped.  If the book wasn’t going to pay off, why invest hours reading it?  I’d just re-read Heinlein instead.  And the more er… “modern” mysteries ran me off most genres and into cozies only, until they shut off that spigot.

The truth is, demanding “a surprise in every book” is akin to demanding “an atomic explosion in every fireplace.”  While atomic energy can be useful (and atomic warfare too, at least as a threat, and no, I’m so not debating this) having an atomic explosion in your fireplace is not only not useful, it’s not convenient, defeats the purpose and, oh, yeah, makes the entire area into a radioactive desert.  Which large portions of genre literature have become, after thirty years of this treatment.

Most of the time, we really don’t want the hero in an erotic romance to turn into a spider on their wedding night and devour the bride.  (Which is why most people wouldn’t read erotica written by me, more’s the pity.)

Most of the time we want the ending to be more or less what we expect.  The occasional good surprise – oh, look, the little dog that was lost in the first chapter came home after the guy and gal got together.  Cuuuuuute. – is okay, but it is not what we read for.

Those of us who are reading-addicts read for the journey; to spend time with characters we like, and to see each get what he/she deserves.

I regret to say this to my fellow literature-degree-holders, but most people want their entertainment to be uncomplicated.  Yes, why, that DOES make you superior to them.  Here’s your cookie, now go sit in the corner, and talk to other geniuses about how much better than average you are.  As for me – pfui – I have a Nero Wolfe book to re-read.

Lately I’ve been delving in the depths of my own trunk stories.  This can be akin to pulling one’s on scabs but not nearly as fun.  It is also, however, useful, since I’m putting up most of those stories (well, the good – or at least decent – ones) with Goldport Press.

It is also, in a way, an education into how a writer grows.  And what (I think) is good and bad despite or besides gatekeepers and all that.

The first thing to shock me is how… mixed my stories are.  Years ago, while taking a workshop in Oregon, I had some inkling of this and told Kris “What annoys me is how mixed my quality is.”  Brother, I spoke a mouthful.  At the time I had no idea, myself.  I had some concept that some of the stories were way better than the others – what I had no idea was HOW MUCH better.  Take 1999, the year I started selling consistently.  It was a good year for short stories.  I wrote about fifty of them.  Twenty of those are – easily – as good as anything I write today.  The others range from bad to appallingly bad to “oh, my heavens, are you going to give me anesthesia before I read these?”

So, what is wrong about the very, very bad, no good, utterly rotten ones?  Am I sure they’re not just a matter of my internalizing gatekeepers’ tastes?  Um… quite.

Amid the stuff I’m putting up, for instance, is a lot of Space Opera, some of it in the Darkship Thieves Universe (well, one story out, for now) and those never sold, but there doesn’t seem to be anything wrong with them.  I suspect what kept those from selling are gatekeeper issues.  First, they were space opera.  Second, they were er… heretical when it came to the perspective of what would be a good future.  With a little clean up, some of it to make sure the history is coherent, there will be ten to fifteen short stories in the future history up by early next year, and maybe a couple of novellas, as well.

But the very, very bad ones are not gatekeepers.  They fall into three camps – the easily salvageable (with work), the “this needs to be seriously expanded” and the “what was I thinking?”

The first one is mostly wording issues.  Yeah, I know, I’m used to thinking of English as my native language, even if I acquired it fourteen years after birth – hey, some of us are built oddly – but let’s just say that in a lot of the stuff written in the late eighties and early nineties you can ear the stiltedness, the “not quite comfortable in the language’s skin” of someone who speaks English as a foreign language.  These grate on me probably more than they would on readers because that’s the way I’m put together.  There are perfectly good authors I can’t read because their language “clangs.”  Again, these stories can be salvaged, given a few rainy afternoons during flu season, when I’m not up to creating anything as such, but can spend time line-by-lining it and changing the wording.

The second category is mostly the future history – the stories that are not just gatekeeper-issues.  You see, I was learning to Heinlein things in with no explanation.  Like any skill you’re learning, I took it to an extreme.  It took me years after writing these to figure out that people like some idea of WHERE in future history the story fits.  Okay, it’s not natural for your character to think “Now that it’s the twenty fifth century” but you can find other ways to drop it in, and people like it.  Being dropped, deaf and blind into the middle of an incomprehensible world irks readers, for some reason.  So, a lot of the future history needs a good go-over and I suspect will become novellas.  (This is at least partly a gatekeeper-in-the-head issue.  I knew there was near to no market over ten thousand words, so I kept things over-lean in an attempt to slid under that bar.  Now the bar isn’t there.  So, never mind, I’ll grow them again.)

The third category is far more difficult and might have to rest-in-drawer though it might get cannibalized for its ideas.  These are wet petards.  In some of them I can, just vaguely, glimpse what I was trying to do, but the story reads like a wet petard – i.e. you get to the end and you go “oh, um” And that’s if you get to the end, because you usually know exactly what will happen all along the way from paragraph two.

So, what gives them their wet petardish quality?  Well… mostly foreshadowing issues.  If there’s only one way for a story to end; if, no matter how big the character’s issue, there is no hope of his succeeding, then why should I read the story?  Or, of course, if there’s no way for the character to fail.  (Series characters and novels are different here.  I’m talking short stories.)  Other serious defects consist of making my villain so loathsome that by page three I’m mad at the hero for not having killed him/her yet, and I don’t want to be in the same story with said villain.

However, let me make clear what’s so obvious to me now truly wasn’t then.  And yes, over time I wrote fewer shorts per year, but they are all decent reads with the usual “your mileage may vary” disclaimers.  I mean, I’m still uneven.  The range just has gotten narrower.

So, the take away?  If you write a lot, eventually you get better.  Also, if you’re in that stage where you know your output is uneven, write a lot.  SOME of it will be good.

Other things I’ve learned from this going over old stuff and putting some of it up: the story that’s outselling all the others ten to one is a seriously flawed story I couldn’t sell anywhere.  Note I didn’t say a BAD story.  It is enjoyable to read and kind of cute, but it’s one of those where things happen to the character – he doesn’t do much.  Is this a gate keeper preference but not a reader preference?  It would seem to be so.  Not that I intend to make an habit of writing flawed stories, but, it’s interesting.

Another observation is that most of my short stories are seriously, seriously depressing.  This is funny, because my novels aren’t.  On the other hand my shorts have gotten more cheerful as time goes by, so perhaps I’m finally growing up.  Or maybe the depression was the search for an emotional punch, which was difficult to come by when I was a young mother with two toddlers in the house the whole time.

One thing my limited marketing – I have less than a dozen short stories up – has shown me is that cheerful sells better.  (Give the lady a duh.)

So, if you’re writing stuff for the public, so far: Avoid wet petards plus write cheerful stories seems to equal profit.  And if the public includes Sarah Hoyt, for the love of heaven smooth that language.  (Like nails on the blackboard, it is.)

And that’s the week that was.  Now that I’m getting over the dreaded crud, I shall go back to writing and relegate the editing/putting up stuff to the evenings, when I’m useless for creative work.  (There is a time when my head feels empty and echoes.)

Oh, the other thing I have found out is that, given the fact I know stories will no longer need to languish in a drawer unless I put them there, I seem to have unleashed something.  I am writing MUCH faster than I ever have and keeping up that production longer.  No, I’m not going to write down numbers, because you’ll either not believe them; assume it’s bad if it’s being written that fast; or think I’m bragging.  BUT I’m truly laying down words at a prodigious rate – fast enough to scare me a little.  And I’m enjoying it more than I have in years and years.  Dean called this effect (not on me but in general) “the writer coming back.”  It is the best way to describe it.  And it feels good.

The good news is that I’m feeling better.  The better news is that I’m using the time to catch up on stuff today.  So, various odds and ends.  Real post tomorrow.

First — I put out a collection with Goldport Press:  http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0067R3Y3K

This is done with my limited resources, so I’m sure we don’t have the slick formatting of Naked Reader Press or Baen, and er.. some typos might have escaped (next on the list is getting a CHEAP copyeditor, or waiting till I make money to get an expensive one.)  Anyway, if you want it, have at it.  I also have several shorts and will — G-d willing and the creek rising slowly — be putting up an SF one today.

So far with ten things out, the wonder for the ages is that the story outselling the others by about 10 times is a) a short story for 99c (are y’all mad?  that’s just not sensible economics!)  b) a short story I could NOT give away for love or money.  It is seriously flawed from the pov of traditional publishing.  So, why is it doing well?  Who knows?  I’d say it’s the cover, but people do download samples before buying, and it’s doing well across all vendors.  One more proof we just don’t know what’s what in this brave new world.

The other incidental is that my son has put up more Ninja Nun.  If you haven’t lately go and look at Agnes.  And if you feel inclined, hit his tip jar.  He’s in pre-med and doing pretty well.  I’m fairly sure he’ll make it into medschool, if nothing else because he’s the sort of stubborn who would try to kill a saber tooth with a leaf (that’s why there aren’t many of us) and he wants to be a neurosurgeon, eventually.  So, the brain you save might, eventually, turn turn turn, be your own.  http://www.robertahoyt.com/comics.html

And now I’ll go and catch up on my editing and writing, because, chilluns, I work for myself and the boss is an unprintable.  My schedule does NOT allow for taking two days off and sleeping (or putting up ebooks) more’s the pity.

And not in a good way.  In case you wondered at no post yesterday, AFGM is LARGELY done, pending line by line, but yesterday I woke up feeling like recycled yuck and today is about the same.  I’ve been trying to write a post but I can’t.

It seems to be “whatever’s going around” characterized MOSTLY by overwhelming exhaustion.   So…  I’ll hopefully be back tomorrow.  Today I’m going to sleep.

I’m trying to finish up A Few Good Men and there’s no space in my head to even put up Austen fanfic.  So amuse yourselves among yourselves.  No hitting, no hair pulling, no dipping of braids in inkwells and ABSOLUTELY no glueing of ears behind back of head (You know who you are.)

Ah’ll be bach.

UPDATE:  A SLIGHTLY EDITED AND PRETTIED UP COMPILATION OF ALL CHAPTERS UP TO A WEEK OLD IS HERE

*I’m posting this novel here, free, one chapter at a time.  This is being posted as I write it, so it’s in pre-earc (for those from Baen) or in close-to (but not quite) -first draft state. Once it’s finished it will undergo editing and then it will be published in some form. I’m going to put this up with its own category so you can find it.  For those interested in throwing something in the storytellers bowl, there is a donate button on the right hand side of the site.  Anyone contributing $6 or more will get an electronic (non DRM) version of the novel upon completion.  Of course, donating is not mandatory.  I hope you enjoy the chapters.  For Director’s Commentary of sorts, look at the bottom of the chapter. *

For first chapter, look here

For seventh chapter, look here.

A Step In The Dark

Nell concentrated on the coordinates to her room and stepped through.  There was the moment of bitter cold of the betweener, the sense of winds howling around her, even though in fact wind could not exist in this dimension that was wholly devoid of air or any other element needed for life.

And then she was stepping into the familiar confines of her room, almost ontop of chalk drawings and a bowl shattered on the floor.

She surveyed the chalk drawings, with dismay, noting that the water had splattered out to mark the floor indelibly with the chalk dust. This was going to be very hard to clean, and before she was done she might very well need to scrub the entire floor and wax it, lest the landlady get upset.  Which she would.  Particularly since Nell had also broken one of the bowls.

It had taken Nell quite a while to truly believe that common belongings were considered precious, or that they were as expensive as they were.  A simple glazed bowl, a platter, anything like that would have been thrown out on Earth the minute it became cracked.  Here, even when broken, the shards would be collected in the hopes that the plate mender might fix it when next he did the rounds of the neighborhood.

She picked up the shards of the bowl carefully and stored it in the cupboard in the corner, hoping to mitigate her landlady’s annoyance by telling her she’d saved the shards to be mended.

Nell couldn’t understand it, and couldn’t work it out logically.  On Earth she’d had plenty of friends who read fantasy and it had been assumed in almost any novel that a society with magic was by necessity prosperous and clean and all the other things real, pre-industrial societies hadn’t been.

But this one wasn’t.  Though Nell wasn’t sure if it was in the past in relation to the world in which she’d grown up and which she still considered the real Earth, this Earth seemed to be stuck somewhere around the regency.  Time was hard to pin down exactly, because this England didn’t seem to have any of the same monarchs.  Or rather, it had the same monarchs up to a point, that point being around the time of Arthur, who in this world was a real documented king, with his prime minister and court magician, Merlin.  In fact, Seraphim, Duke of Darkwater, was supposed to be descended from Merlin and Morgan le Fey.

The thought had brought her right back to the subject her mind had been hoping to avoid.

Having come to it, she realized she couldn’t avoid her obligations another moment.  Taking a pocket watch from her desk, she looked at the time.  Yes.  She had to see Sydell.  For one, he would be expecting a report.  Which would mean that he would be in the park down the street, standing by the lake and scaring the mothers and nannies and the children they supervised by glaring at all of them, taking out on them the fact that Nell was now three minutes late.

Sydell counted punctuality a virtue, one of the many things upon which he and Antoine seemed to disagree violently.  Antoine had told Nell, very early in their acquaintance, that the only appointments worth keeping were those to which both heart and mind concurred and that if an assigned meeting didn’t inflame your heart with wild excitement it wasn’t worth keeping.

The appointment with Sydell, so far from inflaming her heart with wild anything, gave her a strong feeling of having been encased in ice and wishing to run away.  But if she had to hazard a guess, she would imagine that Antoine would actually wish her to keep this one.  Else…

Else, she wasn’t sure exactly what, but she was sure it wouldn’t be pleasant.  Antoine had been arrested the night they’d first set foot in Avalonis.  She’d never been told why or what he had done to deserve that fate, but she thought it was no criminal matter so much as something between Antoine and Sydell – some old vengeance or some unfinished game – because Sydell hadn’t told her that Antoine would be going to trial, or that he would have to serve some sentence for some determined set of time.  Instead, he’d told her that he, Sydell, was holding Antoine D’Argent at the pleasure of the king.  Which pretty much meant, if Nell understood properly, what used to be called in France, in her world, before the revolution, a lettre-de-cachet, that is something that said to apprehend an individual, keep him indefinitely and tell no one where he was.

At the time she hadn’t realized this, and she’d been too numb, too confused, wondering why Antoine would take them to a world where he was likely to meet with such a reception, to be able to even ask how to free him.  Fortunately Sydell had told her, unasked.  You’ll work for me, he’d said.  Three years, three days and three hours.  You are a competent witch and, as the king’s spymaster, I am always in need of one such who can nose out illegal use of magic, crimes against the innocent of unprotected worlds or other things against our law.  You serve me well and you and your paramour will be able to leave Avalonis in peace.

Am I arrested then? She had asked.

Detained, you mean?  No, you are not.  You can leave this very moment, if you wish.  But then your paramour cannot go with you.  And his freedom will be entirely dependent on my benevolence, of which I have very little towards Antoine.

Nell sighed.  Yes, Antoine would definitely want her to keep this appointment.

She picked up her cloak and wrapped herself in it.  It was, like most of her clothes, serviceable.  It had looked Romantic and interesting when she’d first arrived here and all their clothes seemed to be like something out a fairytale.  Now it was just a cloak, a little threadbare, bought second hand because Sydell’s stipend rarely extended beyond the bare necessities of food and lodging.

Clasping the cloak in front, she picked up her reticule and headed out the door, closing it carefully behind her lest the landlady discover the damage to her floor and decide to throw Nell out without ceremony.

On the way to the park she tried to set it in her mind what to say.  Normally, when Sydell had asked her to find out what someone was doing, she found things she didn’t mind telling him about.  Like that woman a few months ago who was sacrificing newborns in order to use their hearts in love potions.  Nell had felt absolutely no qualms about turning her in to Sydell’s justice even though she suspected Avallonis had horrible penalties for her kind of crime.  No.  She hoped Avallonis had horrible penalties for her kind of crime.

But then there was Seraphim.  His crime was terrible by Avallonis standards.  Because, from what she understood, Avallonis was such a strongly magical world, doing business in other worlds was strictly forbidden.  And doing business could be interpreted as merely visiting for some minutes.  But taking people or things out of those worlds – or bringing them in – definitely fell within the definition.  The penalty for that sort of infraction was death.  And the death penalty for Dukes might be beheading, supposedly a quicker and more dignified death than hanging, but someone who was beheaded was still very thoroughly dead.

Yet Nell could see, in her mind’s eye, the boy-shifter pursued by those horrible men with the magic guns, and Seraphim risking his life to save him.  Risking his life to save her.  And then Gabriel Penn…  She shook her head.  She couldn’t imagine turning either of the men in.  But then, she couldn’t imagine not turning them in.  What could she tell Sydell that would satisfy him?  If he thought she hadn’t fulfilled her part of the bargain, what would Sydell do to Antoine?  At various times, the King’s spy master had intimated that only Nell’s good behavior kept Antoine alive.

“Ah, Nell, in a brown study, I see,” Sydell said. Even before she looked up, she knew he was in one of his moods.  It was in the voice which had the biting edge of a chill wind.

Looking up only confirmed it.  Sydell was a man of maybe forty, with black hair, carefully combed back from his forehead, in the style at the moment fashionable for men.  His clothes were as exquisitely tailored as Seraphim Ainsling’s had been: tight coat of blue superfine, so carefully fitted to his powerful torso that she thought it might require a spell to get him into it, and butter yellow breeches, so tight that wearing them in public should constitute an offense against morals.  His cravat: tall and arranged in graceful folds about his neck, was a thing of beauty.

But the face of such a carefully attired gentleman was pale and at the moment peevish, his lower lip slightly advanced, his eyes darting daggers in her direction.

The park, filled with mothers and nannies and children, from those so small they were in carriages, to the ten year olds chasing each other around the lake or feeding the ducks, was a place of life and sound, but everyone seemed to avoid Sydell’s periphery.  Everyone but Nell, and she only because she couldn’t avoid it.

She bobbed a curtsey by habit and with no thought.  It was amazing how quickly such habits developed.  “I beg your pardon, Sydell,” she said.  “I got myself… accidentally enmeshed in a spell, and it took a while to extricate myself.”

He frowned at her, then his lipst curved quickly upward, not in a smile so much as in what seemed like pleasure at her having suffered a delay.  “Well,” he said.  “Well.  What workings did you get involved in?  Was it Darkwater?  What has the Duke been up to.  Tell me without delay.”

And that was Sydell all over Tell me without delay was his version of “please make a report” and delivered with even less ceremony than that would have been.  Unspoken and hanging between those words was the sense that what it all actually meant was “Tell me or else.”

But she could not tell.  She thought of the Duke on the floor, his life-force ebbing away, and of Grabiel Penn desperately pushing strength and magic into the duke with his resurection spell.  She could not let them be arrested.  Oh, they’d broken the law.  They’d assuredly broken the law.  But it was for a good cause, was it not?

She had a notion her argument was slippery, yet looking at Sydell’s pale face, his frosty glare she couldn’t imagine that he would be on the side of right in this.  Instead, she reached, desperately for the story that Penn had told the Duchess.  She’d tell the same story.  Something that juicy would be about town in no time, and the two lies, meeting somewhere in the middle would corroborate each other.  Sydell would never suspect and it would give Nell a little longer to study Darkwater and to find out whether, indeed, anything nepharious hid behind the Duke’s seeming benevolence.

She put a smile on her face and told Sydell, “Nothing of consequence.  It’s so diverting.  I don’t know what you thought Darkwater was doing, but what he is doing is what you expect of a wastrel of his kind.  You see, he left in the middle of his own engagement party to meet with a … a married woman.  And I got pulled into his transport spell, and fell atop the lady’s husband who was hiding in the bushes, and the whole thing got blown out of proportion… or perhaps into proportion.  The offended husband demanded satisfaction, and the Duke got wounded, just as you would expect, and then he transported into his room, and his valet tended to him, and I took the opportunity to return here before anyone asked my name.”

Sydell brought up the cane he’d been playing with, an elaborate affair of varnished mahogany, topped with heavy silver, in the shape of a wolf’s head.  What he said was “I see.”  But what he did was twirl the wolf’s head, as though absently.  “And what was this lady’s name?  Or her husband’s?”

Nell forced a laugh that she hoped sounded like an amused giggle, “How would I know.  You are very well aware I know nothing of the fashionable of your world.”

Suddenly Nell felt dizzy and swayed on her feet.  She blinked, and had a sense that a lot of time had passed.  The small park, with its duck pond, had gone marginally darker and colder, and there were noticeably fewer children than just a moment ago.

“My dear,” Sydell said, and the coldness in his voice belied the apparent meaning of that word.  “You should know that when you travel between worlds, there is magical residue left on your clothes.  You should also know that I am a very hard man to fool.  Next time, do not make me resort to outrageous measures to get the information you owe me.”  He got out a small pouch and handed it to her.  “Here is your stipend, Miss Felix, and do try not to give me difficulties next time.  You will continue keeping an eye on Darkwater, for now.  We need more evidence to leave the case.”

It wasn’t till Sydell walked away that Nell’s mind cleared enough for her to realize he’d put a truth spell on her and got her to tell her all.  Truth spells were much more effective than any truth serum on Earth.  They were also almost a dark art, something no honorable magician would use.  Of course, she’d long ago realized that the king’s spymaster might be an honored man, but he was probably not an honorable one.  An honorable man wouldn’t use her lover’s capivity as a lever to move her in whatever direction he wished.

Then another thought came on the heels of that.  A case against Darkwater.  That meant that they were thinking of persecuting him.  And that Nell had just handed Sydell evidence against the Duke.  She must go back to Darkwater.  She must warn those two men of what was about to befall them.

___________________________________

Director’s commentary:  There isn’t much to say about this chapter.  I know Nell’s background.  Sydell is perhaps a little creepier than I expected, but roughly what I thought he was.

From the craft point of view, in revision I’ll need to make the beginning of the chapter move considerably faster, and give more weight to the dialogue with Sydell.  Perhaps describe how people react to him as a form of foreshadowing.  Believe it or not I did some of this tonight as it was more lopsided before.  However, I’m in the very final phase of A Few Good man and wrote extremely emotional scenes tonight, so while I can apply my reason to these things and know it’s lopsided, I don’t have the necessary emotional sensitivity to fine tune it and I’m afraid I might ruin it if I tamper much further.    Trying to fine tune that kind of timing issue while exhausted and more than half absorbed in another book is akin to trying to tune a guitar while suffering from a head cold.  It will get done when the book is finished.

This is NOT Witchfinder, in case someone wonders.  That’s Friday, even if I posted on Thursday once.  (Avoiding inquiring emails, I am.)

This is something from the trunk.  One of those novels I was forced to pull the plug on.  Because of what it is, it’s not something I can finish in a month, even if it’s almost done, because a) I need to verify the research I did six years ago, because sometimes I make startling mistakes because I believed ONE book.  b)I need to research again, of course.  Enough for the time period to come naturally.

I was reminded of it because #2 son wrote a longish short story set in the period between the wars in Germany and got tons of things wrong.  Not the events, just the texture of daily life, because he apparently has managed to miss my shelves of “daily life in” or maybe just because he is a beginner writer and didn’t realize the need for more extensive research.  (To be honest, he doesn’t write like a beginner, but he’s only just started showing me the stuff.)  Anyway, I told him to set that one in the future because it just didn’t work between the wars unless he wants to ditch one of the main plot points.

Then I woke up and this was awake again…

Time’s Tomorrow

Over The Valley Of The Somme, the 21st of April, 1918.

The wind bit Manfred Freiherr von Richthofen’s exposed face, whipped his white silk scarf into a frenzy.
He didn’t notice.
Hunched forward, Manfred, the Red Baron, held the lever of his airplane in his right hand, while his left pulled the trigger, his square-tipped fingers simultaneously controlling the flight of his plane and firing both of his front-mounted machine guns in a well-practiced way at the fleeing enemy plane.
Far beneath Manfred’s plane, a persistent fog obscured the trenches and the men in them.
Manfred had done his time in the trenches and he would prefer death in the cold, clean air above the clouds to life in the damp mustiness, the sluggish boredom, of the trench.
Despite the cold and the wind that, intensified by the speed of his flight, made the red-painted plywood frame of his plane crackle and groan, Manfred felt warm.
Hot.
His heart beat fast and his pumping blood made his pale-skinned face glow.  His right hand managed the levers, his left thumb squeezed the trigger that fired both machine guns at once.
Tracer bullets flew to the right and left of the enemy plane, leaving glimmering white trails behind.
Right where Manfred wanted them.
Suddenly shots from behind Manfred startled him.  He had a tail.
No matter.  He took a deep breath.  He couldn’t turn and run.  Not now.  Not when he was so close to bringing the enemy down.
Manfred concentrated on the plane ahead, not the one behind.  He thought of what he wanted to happen.  What must happen.
The enemy pilot would land.  He would be forced to land.  And Manfred would claim the credit of having made yet another prisoner for the fatherland.
His sweaty fingers played on the controls, taking his airplane lower and lower, in pursuit of the zigzagging airplane ahead of him.
He savored the inevitable joy of his soon-to-come triumph.  It would be his eighty-first.
The fog had cleared.  Yet, if Manfred glimpsed the mud and trees beneath him — if he saw the hulls of bombed out buildings, destroyed in the years of World War I — it was as an animal sees things, without comprehension or understanding.  He certainly didn’t know where over the valley of the Somme he flew, or when he crossed the lines to the enemy side.
The focus of his icy blue eyes had narrowed to the plane he was pursuing.  Only his prey mattered.
He cared for nothing else
He lost altitude without noticing it, sinking in pursuit of the sinking enemy.  The pounding of blood in his veins, his dry mouth, the excitement before the kill, all of it kept him narrowly aware of the chase.  Only the chase.  He noticed a green hedge ahead of him and jumped it with a tug of his lever, gaining altitude for a moment.
Suddenly, bullets came at him from the front, joining the bullets of his pursuer.  Ground battery bullets.  Futilely, he thought he needed to escape.  Turn tail.  Make for home.
Too late.
He had time to think that he was over enemy lines; that he had been an idiot; that he had violated his own rules, pursuing an enemy into the mouth of danger.  He always told new men in his squadron not to fly too low; not to pursue enemy behind their lines; not to–
Bullets tore into his flesh.
Hot pain ripped his skin and muscles and nerves.  Bullets hit his legs; one shattered his knee.  The convulsion of his pain was cut short by a volley of shots drilling into the soft flesh of his stomach.
A fiery hot bullet pierced his chest.  Unbearable pain blurred his vision as his rib broke under the impact.  His heart trembled, fibrillated, as — stricken — it sought to pump blood to veins it could no longer reach.
He was dead.
He knew he was dead, and yet his head remained clear.  His lungs filled with blood and he felt as though he were being pulled under water — drowned.  His fingers, of their own accord, turned off the engine of the plane.
He didn’t want to go down in flames.  A fiery death had filled all his nightmares for months. Death, yes.  But not in flames.
His body shook uncontrollably, and the mouth he desperately opened couldn’t gather breath into his flooded lungs.
The sharp, salty taste of his own blood, mingled with the lingering sweet traces of the biscuits and marmalade he’d eaten for breakfast.
He thought of his mother and his sister Ilse.  When Germany lost the war — and Manfred had known for some time that Germany would lose — his mother and his sister would be defenseless, at the mercy of the enemy.  If only Lothar— But his younger brother could not be counted on to take responsibility for his family.  Or for himself.
Manfred had known that for some time, too.
He felt cold.  Much too cold.  His body twitched and wrenched spasmodically, in a final, senseless dance.
Why did death take so long?  He couldn’t breathe.  Why did he remain alive?
His plane spiraled towards the ground.
He pulled his goggles off, threw them from him, irrationally trying to remove the red haze that obscured his sight.
His heavy leather flight jacket, his leather coveralls, his fur flight boots, all of those were no obstacle to the cold wind that whipped around and around him as he went down, down.  Blood bubbled out of his mouth.
Lights flashed through his blurred vision and he heard odd voices speaking a language he couldn’t understand.  He caught English words amid the gibberish, “transport” and “time” and “now, now, now, now.”
Hands grabbed him and pulled him.  Celestial beings were unduly rough.  Who would have known the angels spoke English? Manfred tried to remember a prayer, but couldn’t.  And he’d never been taught to pray in English.
Light expanded around him, and yet he fell into darkness.

I’m running as fast as I can.  It might not look like it, when I spend most of my day at the keyboard, but inside I’m running.

Right now, my life has very set times and places.  This will probably change, if/when the kids leave home starting next year.  But right now I wake up at six thirty am to make sure that they get  breakfast and don’t rush out the door with no lunch.  (Look, if I’m not there to make sure, they don’t eat.)

Then I do the absolute necessary (usually catboxes!) around the house, if I’m not going Officeish (usually Wednesdays and Fridays.)  If I’m going officeish, I run up the stairs to shower and get ready, since my ride leaves by seven thirty.

In either case, I sit down by eight or so, do the blog if I haven’t done it before, then write till around three thirty, when I must start doing dual duty again, by starting dinner, doing laundry and whatever else needs it.  Yeah, the guys do stuff around the house (and other extracurricular stuff, too) but ultimately I do most of it because I’m better at it.

If I am still compus mentis, I edit in the evening, most of the time for myself, sometimes for NRP where I’m supposed to edit some of the authors (mostly my friends.)  To this I’m adding editing my own old stuff and putting it up with Goldport Press.  And I try to get to bed by eleven.

Around this fits stuff like birthdays, the occasional weekend away, and yeah, I do consider a walk in the park with my husband an amazing treat.

Now, before you tell me that I’m going to burn out, remember I’ve done this with variations (no officeish till last year, no putting stuff up, no NRP but other stuff I was doing instead) for a good six years.  I’m actually less burned out now than before, and will probably feel a whole lot better next year.

Why next year, you ask?  Because next year I’ll be largely out of contracts.  Does this mean I don’t intend to traditionally publish anymore?  No.  I’ve said before and will say it again that I’ll work for Baen while they want me to.  (I’d say till death do us part, but they’re a corporation and can’t die.  And some people have doubts about me.)  BUT I’m changing the way I’m working with them in the way I’ve wanted to for YEARS but didn’t dare: I’m writing everything on spec, sending in, and letting them decide if they want it or not then.

Until this year, this was not a feasible strategy.  Why not?  Because I have a really high sell-through rate on proposals for a working writer – I sell between fifty and seventy five percent of every proposal I write.  See where that’s not a practical way to live, if I’m only selling fifty to seventy five percent of every NOVEL I write?

But now that’s not a consideration.  If there are things they don’t want to publish, then I’ll bring them out myself.  I have yet – save for one, and that was not from Baen, and it sold to someone else – to get a rejection on any of my books that cites a flaw with the book.  Most of them say something like “we have too many of ” or cite reasons that the editor doesn’t like it that have to do with the editor not the book.  Like the famous “Your woman wasn’t assertive enough” – I’ll leave it as a class exercise to imagine how assertive my female character was, and how insane that comment is.

Add to that that I hate writing proposals and that this is incredibly stressful to me, because once the characters come alive it’s wrenching to have to let them die while I move on to something else and leave that book unfinished.  Yes, I know that’s crazy, but that’s how it feels.  Also my proposals usually fell like I’m groping around looking for a plot, which is largely true, since I don’t plot THAT way and therefore don’t know all the twists before I write the novel.

Now I don’t have to deal with that.  And I don’t intend to.  Baen will get all my DST-time books, and all my shifter books, and perhaps others I think are up their alley, depending on how many books they have in cue, and what I want to be seen when (the idea of having control over this is by the way amazing.)  I might even send some books other places, if I don’t think they’re right for Baen.

But in either case, it won’t matter.  If the traditional publishers won’t publish them, I’ll find other ways to bring them out.

Now, consider that writing a book a month is not difficult for me (and that’s taking weekends off) but that what’s been stopping me are the months of self-doubt in between, when I sit in front of the keyboard and not a word emerges.

If you subtract those months, it will look like I’m working harder.  But I’ll actually be relaxing more.

So, no matter what it looks like, over the next year I intend to keep running.  But this time, not on ice.  Or at least, I’ll get me some cleats.

Sometimes I have reading cravings.  Now, most of the time these are easy enough.

Like most of you, I go through phases.  I will read mysteries of a certain type, for instance (cozies, or historical or sometimes – not often – procedurals) for months at a time, then suddenly be unable to face the idea of reading another one.

It is well known – because I was rather shocked and blogged about it – that I spent a considerable period of the beginning of the year reading regencies.

These sort of make sense.  They’re usually diametrically opposed to whatever I’m writing at the moment, and the amount they’ll be memorable or absorbing is inversely proportional to my need for a vacation.  I.e., if I’m reading a book whose title and author will be gone ten seconds after I set the book down, you can probably bet that I’m stressed and in need of, if not actually on vacation.

During the year from heck – six books due and homeschooling the younger kid – I read mostly Disney comics.  (Stop laughing.)

All that is perfectly understandable.

But what do you call it when I start craving non fiction books of a particularly dry kind?

Well, it depends on the DRY book.  For some reason biology manuals and dinosaur books are for me, personally, the equivalent of hot chicken soup and a nice warm bath for other people.  If in addition to being extremely tired I’m also coming down with something, you’ll find me curled up in a corner reading books on the biology of some specialized marine life form, or the habits of the common ant.  Yeah, there’s a reason.  I became fascinated with that type of book at about eight, and spent many a happy childhood hour reading them.  So they’re “cozy.”

But what about a sudden interest in… oh, revolutions.  Or massacres?  They’re no one’s definition of cozy.  I also spent a whole year reading books about cults (I THINK I’m starting to get a glimmer on what that one is about.)  Months reading about the history of chocolate.  Months on the flu pandemic (back in 98, when it was hard to find stuff to read on line.  I spent hours scouring all the bookstores I could get to.)

Then there’s the truly out of nowhere wild hares.  It would make sense if you could say “oh, you stumbled on that book, liked it, and now are reading everything about that type of thing” but it’s not like that.  It’s more I wake up in the middle of the night, and like someone would say “I feel like a crab patty” I go “what I could use RIGHT NOW is a good book on the building of medieval cathedrals” or “painters in Paris in the nineteenth century” or “medieval cities.”

All I can say is that after those years or months of reading on one subject, I’ll suddenly go completely cold on it.  And then a few months or years later, an idea will come up for which that reading was essential.

Do the ideas come up because I read the books?  Or as the craving set off by the nascent idea?  Do ideas occur so deep in the subconscious that I don’t know they exist at all and they manifest themselves only as cravings?

I find that idea vaguely terrifying.  It would seem to imply a life of the mind outside the mind, as it were.  And yet it would fit the facts to an extent.  Does anyone else get these non-physical cravings?  What are your theories on the why of these?

and other imponderables…

Writing is a weird job.  Once becomes a job, that is, which for the vast majority of writers, it isn’t.

I noted early on that for most of the writers that made it big, writing was a full time job.  And it was a full time job before it justified the money they made, because they were forced to stay home for other reasons.  For me it was kind of, sort of like that.

In fact, it still IS pretty hard to say that I’m a full time writer.  I’m a full time writer as opposed to working ALSO outside the home.  I’m a full time writer insofar as it is the only one of my jobs that pays in real cash.  Is it the job that takes most of my time?  I’d say that’s evenly divided between writing and housekeeping/house management.  (Yes, I do dream one day of affording one of those.)  And I’d hate to admit to exactly how many days I only work an hour or so as a writer, and the rest of the day as a handywoman/cook/cleaner/bottle washer.  I’d hate to admit it, because several of you, at various times, have offered to come cook and clean for me, something that is PARTICULARLY disturbing when I know and you know you live across the country.  Yes, I do appreciate you love my books that much (Weirdly, mostly Kyrie and Tom) but all the same, you have to agree it sounds a little odd.  (Okay, so I’d have scrubbed floors all day for a peek at Heinlein’s first drafts.  But my dears, I’m not Heinlein.)

Anyway, the thing is, once it becomes job in the sense that you have deadlines and that at least part of your income depends on writing, you get hit between the eyes with exactly how odd it is.

You see, the thing is, at least for me so much of writing depends on the subconscious, that I can’t always say “I’m going to write this now.”  This collides HARD with my personality, which has a strong sense of doing what I’m supposed to when I’m expected to and not whining about it.

For years now, because I was working with main stream publishing, my schedule went something like this: Get an oh wow idea – say, musketeer mysteries.  Write proposal.  Send out to agent.  Depending on the agent (I had four, serially) get back suggestions or simply a “I don’t think I can sell this” which could take anywhere from a week or two to six months to get back.  Needless to say by the time it was six months, I’d be doing something else.  This was particularly vexing for historical, because the research wouldn’t ALWAYS be fresh in my mind, and I could very easilly confuse current historical period with old one.

Send revised proposal in, then wait.  Selling periods for my proposals, from moment they hit publisher desk range from twenty minutes (yes, it was Jim Baen.  Shifters.  I sent it in, email, went for a walk with my husband.  Came home in twenty minutes.  Had an offer in email.)  to eight years.  Needless to say, twenty minutes NOT a problem.  The idea was still hot in my mind.  Eight years… well.  The proposal was written in 97.  Let’s just say… I wasn’t that person anymore and be done with it, shall we?

And half the proposals just never sold.   Which is the average sell-through rate, actually.

Now, I’m not complaining.  I made a living at this for ten years, with one year off (2003.  Man was that year fun – not.)  But the thing was when the books sold, setting the delivery date was a matter or working with the publisher, and… ye can’t always get what ye want…

Which meant that I often found myself with, say, three books due a year for a particular series, while doing three other series.  2007 – which was no end of fun, too – chained six books, one after the other: shifters and musketeer mysteries and MBE.  Which meant I finished GTAC in time to start Soul of Fire, in time to do another musketeer mystery, in time…

It wasn’t the books that killed me.  It was the SILENCE in between, as I tried to “switch heads.”

Of necessity much of the writing for traditional publishing – a creature of deep scheduling – is write it when it’s up.  And to the extent I’ll still do that, I’ll still have to make my subconscious jump through hoops on demand, a process that works about half the time.

But it might be easier if in between I can write what my mind is hot on “right now.”

In fact, just knowing that I can let my subconscious write on spec and that I can always bring it out and bring it out quickly feels like a great calm descending over me.

I think it’s because it gives me a measure of control.  Could be, of course, because I’m insane.

The problem is this.  There are… twenty some novels, outlined, the first three to five chapters written (which is to say the work half done) that are stirring and wakening.

And I’m faced again with the problem I had when I started out.  How do you pace yourself when it feels like everything you do is a collaboration between you and that blind idiot you call your subconscious?  It’s not like the bum cares about deadlines or even Nanowrimo…

At the same time there is this (probably morbid) curiosity.  If I’m not fighting the lack of control, the incredible tiredness, the schedule not of my own setting (at least for most of the books) can I do a book a month?

Or do I have to do what I do on the treadmill, and set it for a pace I can keep up for the long run, instead of a burst of speed and a long rest?